Ill Tell Me Ma

Product Description

Local rather than international the dramas & privations described in this memoir are not the stuff of headlines. This is the story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast after the war; an ordinary boy who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut & author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment & survival that was An Evil Cradling". In this remarkable & equally moving act of retrieval Brian Keenan has captured the vanished world of 1950s Belfast in all its vivid vernacular & grey post-war austerity. This is a time of licorice & Airfix models pigeon-fanciers street vendors selling coal & bleach & herring street-fighters with lions on chains
- a city where westerns were showing every afternoon at the Picture Theatre where livestock was still herded onto the docks & the shipyards flourished. It was also a place of ghosts: the plague dead in the cemeteries the family dead in the scrapbooks a witchs box discovered under the stairs the giant street bonfires every 12th of July to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne. By the end of the book after his fathers death & his mothers Alzheimers Belfast itself becomes a ghost city to Brian Keenan the boy who leaves to become a man. Rich in detail & atmosphere " Ill Tell Me Ma" is an affectionate story of a disaffected childhood. At the centre is a shy self-conscious boy of unusual moral integrity; a boy puzzled by religion & sectarianism in love with books & music & full of curiosity about the world outside. A book of reclamation " Ill Tell Me Ma" is also a coming-to-terms with the past: a resounding thrilling record of redemption."